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Metaphors Journalists Live By (Part II)

The conclusion of our story of the bad things that can happen when
journalists refuse to criticize themselves

Part I of this essay

ended with a Washington-based

**New York Times**reporter smirking. He did so while explaining to
author Jeff Sharlet, who logged thousands of reporting miles and hours
of deep engagement with the best scholarship on the subject for his book
The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
,
why he was foolish to suggest the

**Times**consider referring to Donald Trump and his supporters as
"fascists" and "racists."

The

**Times**reporter asserted that journalists instead should "just [write]
what's going on," that to "offer a label" that was "going to be
debated" would just "distract from the reporting."

And besides: "The market has spoken, and they like what we're doing."
The

**Times**, he repeated several times, still has ten million subscribers,
even if "a lot of people have

**thoughts**, and feel ownership over The New York Times because they
have been readers and subscribers for many years."

That claim of the market as the final arbiter of success did not make
Jeff Sharlet a happy man.

"

**The market has spoken?!** Tell me about your metaphor! Your defining
metaphor. The market spoke in 2016 and made a fascist president. The
market spoke in Tennessee today
.
Was that successful? The Wisconsin state legislature
;
is

**that**the market speaking?" On that last point, Sharlet was referring
to politics being overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans in a fairly
even state, via district maps secretly plotted
in a law office so that the
conspirators could hide behind attorney-client privilege. (The state
supreme court finally ordered an end to this

earlier this year.)

The

**Times**man

****replied with such passion that his voice squeaked: "It

**is**the market speaking!"

His next point he managed to deliver more calmly: "The market spoke in
2010. And they gave the Republicans a majority. Everyone knew in 2010
what the Republicans stood for, and they won." But to my ears, it landed
with a screech.

In the book I'm working on now, I write of how Republicans
nationalized that election around the message of the Tea Party movement.
Hundreds of articles reported uncritically
-"just
writing what's going on"-what adherents said "Tea" stood for,
literally: The letters T, E, and A were an acronym for "taxed enough
already." No newspapers, ever, bothered to interject that that made
little more sense than the claim, habitually flagged as false in news
reports now, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

Obama signed a law in his first month in office cutting taxes on 97
percent of Americans who worked for wages, by an average of $1,200 per
family. Obama referred to his "Making Work Pay" tax cut in just about
every speech. But thanks to credulous reporting like that in 2010-some
of the most egregious coming from the

**Times-**a poll

taken a year after it took effect found that over half believed the
Obama administration kept taxes the same, about a quarter thought he
raised them, and only 12 percent gave the right answer. Interesting,
what "everyone knew."

The very premise of the "market speaking" screeched in Sharlet's ears.
"Everyone knows what the Republicans stood for?! I met a man in
Waukesha-he had a Trump flag-who said he hates the Democrats because
they made abortion illegal. This is ridiculous ... You say you're
doing the reporting-"

Mr.

**Times**, heatedly: "It's true! No one else is doing the reporting
we're doing. No one has the breadth. No one has the reporters in as
many places. I was the last person who was at events in Wisconsin two
nights in a row ... their people weren't ..."

Cross talk-which ended thus with the

**Times**man huffing: "You attacked The New York Times! ... You came on
and said, 'I need to explain to

**you** why The New York Times doesn't use the word fascist to refer
to people,' and I explained to you that the reporting is more powerful
than any label that you want to put on it. And you came after me."

He hadn't. But Sharlet tried a peace offering to cool things down:
"For The New York Times to say, 'We are the arbiters, and the market
has spoken, and that we're the only ones doing an adequate job:

**None of us**have done an adequate job."

At which the

**Times**reporter heated things up again:

"Hey, if you don't think The New York Times is doing an adequate job,
you don't have to subscribe to the paper."

As Sharlet reflected to me when we spoke, "This to me was sort of a

**jaw-dropping**statement, even if you love your paper. I mean, what are
you? This is like you're a paperboy on the steps trying to sell me a
subscription, not somebody describing how journalists should work
together: 'You get this piece, I do this piece, we develop a picture
of the world.' Right?"

Apparently not. The Q&A brought worse.

[link removed]

SHARLET WAS ASKED BY HIS BOOKSTORE HOST how he earned the trust of his
subjects who tell him the extraordinary things they tell him. He
answered, "I treat them with respect." A word he didn't use, but might
also have, was "humility." He told of a Wisconsin militia leader who
welcomed him into his home, showed off the veritable armory he kept laid
out on his pool table, and explained why he had decided not to run him
off his property: "He says, 'You're a fed, an intruder, or a fool.
Fed:

**shoot**. Intruder:

**shoot**. Fool: we'll see.' So I aced that test. I'm the fool."

That seemed rather to take the wind out of the other guy's sails, when
it came to whether Sharlet was a real reporter.

Sharlet continued, "I can't have a conversation with this person
unless I come to him from a place of transparent subjectivity." The
alternate model-"objectivity"-he described as a baleful ideological
artifact of the Cold War, when American elites needed the "

**imagination** of a place in the center."

I love that point. For what this imagination too often ended up creating
was platforms from which certain sorts of powerful people could speak
the way they wished,

**downward**, uncontested. Which, I think, is part of what does not work
about traditional political journalism anymore.

There are good arguments to be made against that perspective. But not
the one the guy from the

**Times**Washington bureau made, that the

**Times**' success in "the market" affirmed the unquestionable wisdom
of all of that.

Despite himself, Sharlet mocked:

"The market has spoken! Ten million readers! Tucker Carlson, with his
pinky finger"-he trailed off. "

**We're** not the mainstream anymore. We're the fringe."

[link removed]

What the discussion came down to, in the end, was the metaphors.

**The**

**New York Times**, its representative was claiming, doesn't use them.
Doesn't need them

**.**Nor narrative frames. Nor labels. "Just writing what's going on"
is all: America's Newspaper of Record as a perfect, unblemished window
unto reality itself. Consider what happened when Jenny from Lake County,
Illinois, asked for comment about her frustration that the local daily
seemed reluctant to report on "white Christian nationalist imagery in
Republican campaigns." She said she was "concerned by our inability to
confront extremism."

The

**Times**man was instinctively passionate in his defense of the home
team. He launched into a detailed response that began, "Well, I think
there has been more reporting on

**white Christian nationalism** in The New York Times than anywhere else
..."

At that, Sharlet nailed his interlocutor dead to rights.

"White Christian nationalism," he noted, was not simply "what was going
on." It is a

**label**. One whose accuracy, appropriateness, and heuristic value
scholars argue over just as passionately as they do the unmentionable
"f-word." To unthinkingly pass it on, as Mr.

**Times**did, whereas "fascism" must be dismissed: "It's a little
bit," Sharlet observed, "like the textbooks down in [Florida
]
about Rosa Parks. 'One group were not allowed to sit in the front of
the bus.' But we're not going to say [which group].

**The people decide**, right?"

Meanwhile, "we're not naming the thing that's in front of us."

Although, actually, he is not quite right. By not naming it "fascism,"
when others responsibly name it that, the

**Times**is, effectively, naming it "not fascism."

All journalists label. All journalists clothe reality in metaphors, and
hang their narratives on pre-existing frames. Bad ones-or if we're
being generous, ones following bad institutional rules-are the ones
who refuse to acknowledge that. Which means they can't thoughtfully

**change** their labels, metaphors, and narrative frames-if they
refuse to think about them, as a point of pride.

Though in this instance, alas, the market metaphor

**is** appropriate: It will reward them. It always seems to be the
journalists who are most smug in the face of those begging them for
self-criticism that fortune favors most.

They're like the character in Molière, who, after asking what this
fancy word "prose" meant, was shocked to learn he'd been writing it
all his life. In this case, however, a reporter's chosen metaphor,
which he doesn't seem to recognize as

****a metaphor, is especially corrosive. For in the "marketplace," the
Chicago school of economics teaches us, plurality is proof of
excellence. Outcomes must be read backwards as the unquestioned,
unquestionable view of the People themselves. As, in fact,

**reality**-which is quite a problem if you're writing about a
movement where the ticket for entry is

**denying**

**reality**, and whose

**avant-garde** threatens

those who dare defy their fantasies, and act according to actual reality
,
with violence.

Which you might at least

**consider**calling "fascism."

You may, by now, have wondered something. I checked it out for you: Yes,
of course The New York Times uses the word "fascist" to describe present
political movements. Just not movements in the U.S.
-

**unthinkingly**, one might surmise. That's a problem we'll wrestle
with in our next column, on how the ideology of American exceptionalism
blights this entire discussion.

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

Follow Rick Perlstein on Twitter ,
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